Dog Warrior by Wen Spencer

photo. Lean and fit as the Iron Horses described, the Dog Warrior wore biking leathers with savage style. With dark hair grizzled with silver, he smelled like a wolf and radiated the same prickly awareness that Ukiah had against Atticus’s senses.
    Pack knows Pack.
    â€œSo you are like two peas in a pod,” Shaw murmured in a deep, carrying voice. “The question is, at the heart of it all, are you the same man that your brother is?”
    â€œWhere’s Ukiah? Is he safe?”
    â€œIt’s a little late to worry about that, boy.”
    What did that mean? Did the Dog Warriors have Ukiah,or had someone else come and taken him? If his brother was safe with the bikers, why had Shaw attacked Atticus?
    â€œI want to scratch your surface a little.” Shaw sneered. “See what’s underneath.”
    Shaw lunged at him with inhuman speed, and his punch felt like being hit by a high-powered bullet. Atticus countered with two punches, both of which Shaw dodged as though the fight were choreographed, allowing Atticus to come so close to hitting that he could feel the heat of Shaw’s skin.
    â€œCome on, boy, you’re thinking too much.” Shaw struck him again, knocking him down the sand dune. Atticus tried to duck the next blow, but Shaw, grinning, landed it anyhow.
    Shaw battered him down the hill and to the water’s edge. Atticus fought with silent desperation, but his kicks and punches kept failing to land on their target. Shaw was as elusive as a shadow, always a fraction of an inch out of reach.
    â€œIf you’re going to fight someone who can read your thoughts,” Shaw said into his mind, “you have to fight without thinking.”
    Atticus went still with shock. He’d been gathering information on the Dog Warriors, watching the evidence mount up that they were much like him, but he’d somehow denied the deep truth. He wasn’t one of a kind—he was part of a race that he knew nothing about. The vast shifting of his universe stunned him to his core.
    With a scoffing laugh, Shaw tackled him into the surf. The water sucked them out, away from the shore, and then tumbled them back to the land.
    A score of men and women lined the shore, waiting for them. Even standing still, they were sleek, dark, and dangerous in the way of poisonous snakes. The moonlight gleamed in their eyes, and the scent of wolves overrode that of humans. Over the roar of the surf, he could hear theirgrowling, their hostility pressing against him, as irritating as his own anger.
    His brother stood on the shore, flanked by Dog Warriors, wholly one of them.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Hyannis, Massachusetts
Monday, September 20, 2004
    Ukiah had only heard the car arrive, but he felt the Pack’s arrival as they swept in behind it and broke down doors to get to him. Rennie reached him first, cuffing him lightly in rough affection. Then awareness moved through the Pack and they made way for an outsider among them. He recognized Indigo by her scent as she picked her way through the dark house to him. When he folded her into his arms, he found that she wore a plain black leather jacket, all signs of her being FBI hidden away. She clung to him hard and parted reluctantly.
    She peered at the splintered door frame, smashed into the room and hanging drunkenly on a wedge of drywall. “Direct as usual, Shaw.”
    â€œIt’s faster to break them down than try to pick the locks,” Rennie rumbled, anger pushing him to nearly growling. He didn’t like that Ukiah had been locked up, or the silent reports from the Dogs upstairs on what they were discovering.
    Ukiah realized then what their combined presence—Indigo and the Dog Warriors—meant. She’d brought them as backup. “You’re working together?”
    â€œWe weren’t sure what we’d be walking into,” Rennie said, but meant, what Indigo would be walking into alone.
    Ukiah flashed over his conversation with